Overview

The legendary story of WrestleMania began with a dream that grew into a sports-entertainment extravaganza at WWE WrestleMania 32.

OVERVIEW AND OBJECTIVES

Charlotte flies through the air with a moonsault onto opponents Sasha Banks and Becky Lynch in the Women's Championship Match at WWE WrestleMania 32.

WWE WrestleMania is the premiere annual event for World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), bringing hundreds of thousands of the WWE Universe – our worldwide fans – to our host city to celebrate the culmination of WWE’s storylines at our largest, grandest showcase of the year.

WWE WrestleMania 32, held April 2, 2016, was the most attended event in WWE history, packing in 101,763 fans into AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, seen live by a company-record audience worldwide via pay-per-view and WWE Network, WWE’s OTT streaming and on-demand network.

With the potential of a record-breaking crowd at our flagship event, our goals of WWE’s WrestleMania 32 social and digital campaign were:

To highlight the sights and sounds of WrestleMania week events, including:

The four-day WrestleMania Axxess fan festival.

WWE NXT TakeOver: Dallas Live Event and live WWE Network broadcast.

WWE charity events and Superstar appearances.

WrestleMania Sunday events, from sunrise to the final bell.

WWE Monday Night Raw, with all the fallout from WrestleMania’s matches.

Provide a first-person look at WWE Superstars’ WrestleMania Week experiences, using Facebook Live and Periscope, and content from the Superstars’ own Twitter and Instagram accounts.

STRATEGY AND TACTICS

The kickoff of WrestleMania social media coverage begins five months prior to the event, at the WrestleMania On-Sale Party at AT&T Stadium in November 2015. More than $1 million in event tickets are sold through social-distributed pre-sale codes via Ticketmaster.

With such a massive event taking place, WWE’s Social Team incorporated a five-man team of social media producers and managers on the ground in Dallas, working alongside WWE.com's content editors and video producers, to gather, curate and disseminate social media assets from WrestleMania Week events.

Back at WWE world headquarters in Stamford, Conn., a team of six social media editors took the content provided by the producers on the ground, and redistributed their photo and video assets across more than 200 WWE Superstar and WWE-branded social media accounts across 10 different platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Vine, YouTube, Pheed, Tumblr, Google+ and Pinterest.

The HQ team of social media editors utilized SnappyTV to grab live highlights and GIFs of the WrestleMania Week event broadcasts, and share them instantly to Facebook, Vine and Twitter.

The editors also live-tweeted more than 15 hours of WrestleMania Week broadcasts, including WrestleMania 32, WWE NXT TakeOver: Dallas, The WWE Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony, and moderated live Twitter crawls utilized on-screen multiple times during the events.

WRESTLEMANIA SOCIAL & DIGITAL INITIATIVES

With its digital and social media initiatives for WrestleMania Week, WWE provided fans with unprecedented access to WWE Superstars and more WWE content than ever before, with special features and exclusives from WWE's partners in entertainment and our event partners in Dallas. These included:.

The power of WrestleMania Week was on full display as WWE Superstars took over the city, community and all major news outlets en route to the Grandest Stage of Them All, WrestleMania 32!

WRESTLEMANIA KICKOFF SHOW: Before WrestleMania's start, a live 2-hour Kickoff Pre-Show was live-streamed across social media and WWE Network, along with the final hour broadcast on USA Network. Exclusive matches were held during the pre-show, as well as analysis and match previews for all of WrestleMania's championship and rivalry matches.

#FREEWrestleMania: With WWE Network offering a free 30-day trial to all new subscribers, a campaign to promote the hashtag #FreeWrestleMania was launched across social media, kicked off by The Rock, showing potential subscribers they could watch all of WrestleMania Week's events at no cost.

INFLUENCER PROMOTION: WrestleMania is a pop-culture extravaganza. Celebrities from all walks of music, television, movies and more participated in WrestleMania Week events and were in attendance at WrestleMania itself, sharing their experiences with their large social media followings, and re-shared to WWE's following.

Watch the WWE WrestleMania 32 Snapchat Live Story

SNAPCHAT LIVE STORY: : As part of a multi-year partnership, Snapchat covered WrestleMania via a Live Story. Snickers, the official presenting partner of WrestleMania, was WWE’s first-ever Snapchat Live Story brand partner. The WWE Universe contributed video and photo snaps to one collective WrestleMania Live Story, which captures the real story of the event, straight from the fans, organizers, and everyone in between.

BACKSTAGE POST-MATCH INTERVIEWS: Distributed via social media, our digital media team was waiting to get post-match reaction from WWE Superstars and celebrities, such as NBA Hall of Famer Shaquille O'Neal, who participated in the Andre The Giant Memorial Battle Royal.

"THE ROCK HAS COME BACK..." - Part of five straight WrestleManias in a guest or main eventer capacity, The Rock's promised involvement in WrestleMania 32 was speculated heavily upon on social media in the lead-up to the Show of Shows.

WRESTLEMANIA WORKOUTS: The WWE Digital team distributed workout videos for select WWE Superstars, showing their preparation for their biggest match of the year.

The Rock makes a fiery entrance in front of more than 101,000 at WrestleMania 32 at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas.

OUR RESULTS

Broadcast live on WWE Network, WrestleMania 32 set a new attendance record of 101,763, as fans from all 50 states and 35 countries converged on AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas.

WrestleMania 32 was the most social event in WWE history, according to Nielsen Social with 2.5 million mentions on Twitter throughout the day and 1.3 million mentions during the broadcast alone, an increase of 50 percent and 18 percent year-over-year, respectively.

WrestleMania 32 garnered a record 10.9 million social media fan engagements, up 19% from the prior year. (Social media fan engagements are defined as the cumulative fan response to WWE content measured by the number of “likes”, “follows”, “shares”, “mentions”, and “retweets” across social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Tumblr.)

WWE-related content saw more than 250 million video views across WWE.com, WWE App and social media during WrestleMania Week, an increase of 122 percent year-over-year.

WWE Network, reached a record 1.82 million total subscribers following WrestleMania 32. This is a 39% increase from March 30, 2015, the day after WrestleMania last year.

WWE Network subscribers viewed 21.7 million hours during WrestleMania Week or 12 hours per subscriber during the week. This compares to 15 million hours last year, a year-over-year increase of 45 percent.

WrestleMania 32 set a new WWE attendance record of 101,763, as fans from all 50 states and 35 countries converged on AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. The previous WWE attendance record was at WrestleMania 3 in 1987, where 93,173 fans filled the Pontiac Silverdome in Detroit.

WrestleMania 32 became the highest grossing live event in WWE history, grossing $17.3 million. Last year’s WrestleMania 31 previously held WWE’s record for gross revenue at $12.6 million.

WrestleMania 32 generated $170.4 million in economic impact for the Dallas/Arlington region this past April, according to a study conducted by the Enigma Research Corporation. This marks a new record for WrestleMania’s economic impact and the fifth consecutive year that WrestleMania generated more than $100 million in economic impact for its host region.

72 percent of fans that attended WrestleMania were from outside the greater Dallas/Arlington region and stayed an average of 3.9 nights.

$25 million was spent on hotels and accommodations within the Dallas/Arlington region.

The economic impact derived from WrestleMania Week was equal to the creation of 1,550 full-time jobs for the area.

$8.4 million was spent by visitors to the Dallas/Arlington region at area restaurants.

WrestleMania set data usage records, totaling 8.6TB on the AT&T network. This set a new record for data traffic at AT&T Stadium, an increase of 36 percent over the data traffic during the College Football Playoff National Championship Game in 2015.

WWE generated a record-breaking $4.55 million in WrestleMania merchandise revenue, an increase of 37 percent or $1.2 million, from last year’s previous record at WrestleMania 31.